When merely existing is a risk

26 | International Alert

26 | International Alert Whenmerelyexistingis a risk Women identified as lesbians have been cast as a threat to the purportedly ‘natural’ patriarchal order, SGMs have been wrongly conflated with paedophiles and those with non-heterosexual SOGI have been viewed as ‘diseased’ or ‘contagious’, as for example in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Serbia, but also Russia and Ukraine. 105 On the other hand, some Western European countries, along with Israel, the US, Canada and Australia, have also seen the rise of a phenomenon called ‘homonationalism’. Originally developed by Jasbir Puar, the concept refers to the way that acceptance of SGM rights are increasingly seen as prerequisites to being (or becoming) a liberal, progressive society. At the same time, however, they are also used to differentiate between those deserving of state protection and national belonging and those who are not – the ‘right kind’ of citizens and values. This tends to affect non- Western immigrants in particular, but also affects populations such as Palestinians in the Israeli case. 106 Before, during and after violent conflict, many nationalist groups have depicted themselves as hyper-masculine and inherently heterosexual through the media and other outlets, while painting other nations, groups and actors as “subordinate (homosexual) masculinities” – language that explicitly excludes and denigrates gay, lesbian and transgender people. 107 Insinuations of homosexuality are also often used to delegitimise political opponents, as for example in Northern Ireland’s decades-long conflict, where such allegations were regularly deployed by both the Republican Catholic and Protestant Unionist sides to “cast aspersions on one’s integrity”. 108 All-too-common backlashes against gender equality and SOGI rights in the wake of conflict are shaped by rejections of difference, societal change and externally imposed norms (actual or perceived). The uncertainty of post-conflict recovery has been known to give rise to what has been called ‘golden age-ism’, a (usually heteronormative) longing for a purportedly better time in the past when families, gender relations and social life was seen to be better. 109 War-torn societies often seek to reinstate or invent conservative gender roles in the name of improving social order and the existence of SGM groups within society disrupts and challenges those goals. 110 This harking back to an imagined heteronormative past does not come only from those who lived in pre-conflict times: in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina, homo-, bi- and transphobic violence is perpetrated by members of all communities (Bosnian Muslim, Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Serb), in particular young men who have grown up or were born after the end of the war. Some are organised through nationalist football fan clubs, but violence has also been perpetrated by religiously motivated groups such as Wahhabis. Homophobia thus acts as an extremely unfortunate unifying factor and also becomes a cornerstone of nationalist and/or religiously tinged identities. As in other countries, increased SGM activism has been met with increased violence, pointing to the limits of purported tolerance, which is contingent upon SGM persons being invisible. 111 105 Interviews with SGM rights activists, London, February 2016; J. Radoman, M. Radoman, S. Đurđević-Lukić and B. Anđelković, LGBT people and security sector reform in the Republic of Serbia, Belgrade: Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and Public Policy Research Centre, 2011, p.24; Public Information and of Knowledge NGO (PINK) Armenia, From prejudice to equality: Study of societal attitudes towards LGBTI people in Armenia, Yerevan: PINK Armenia, 2016, http://www.pinkarmenia.org/wp-content/ uploads/2016/06/From-Prejudice-to-Equality-English.pdf; M. Eristavi, “I’m gay in Ukraine and my country despises me”, Politico, 27 November 2015, http://www.politico.eu/article/gay-ukraine-my-country-despises-me; T. Ana, 2015, Op. cit.; J. Lytvynenko, 2015, Op. cit.; N. Shahnazaryan, A. Aslanova and E. Badasyan, 2016, Op. cit. 106 J.K. Puar, Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Examples of this include Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom in the Netherlands and the Sweden Democrats, which organised a gay pride parade through an area of Stockholm with a large Muslim population in July 2016 with the aim of provoking the latter (see A. Sehmer, Sweden right-wingers plan LGBT march through Stockholm’s Muslim-majority neighbourhoods, The Independent, 25 July 2015, http://www.independent.co.uk/ news-19-4/sweden-right-wingers-plan-lgbt-march-through-stockholms-muslim-majority-neighbourhoods-10415932.html). 107 T. Pavasović Trošt and K. Slootmaeckers, Religion, homosexuality and nationalism in the western Balkans: The role of religious institutions in defining the nation, in S. Sremac and R.R. Ganzevoort (eds.), Religious and sexual nationalisms in central and eastern Europe: Gods, gays and governments, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015, p.158 108 M. Duggan, 2012, Op. cit., 14–15 109 H. Myrttinen, J. Naujoks and J. El-Bushra, 2014, Op. cit., p.9 110 S. McEvoy, Queering security studies in Northern Ireland: Problem, practice, and practitioner, in M. Lavinas Picq and M. Thiel (eds.), Sexualities in world politics: How LGBTQ claims shape international relations, London: Routledge, 2015, p.146; see also C. Enloe, The curious feminist: Searching for women in a new age of empire, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004; S. Niner, Hakat Klot, Narrow steps: Negotiating gender in post-conflict Timor-Leste, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 13(3), 2011, pp.413–435 111 Interviews with SGM rights activists, Sarajevo, December 2015

Whenmerelyexistingis a risk International Alert | 27 Faith-based forms of nationalism have tended to reject same-sex relationships and non-normative gender identities, using their power within nationalist movements and conflict-related confusion and reconstruction as opportunities to press their cases. In Serbia, for example, the Orthodox Church has participated in marches against the Belgrade Pride Parade, carrying incense to cleanse the city. Religious nationalists, claiming to represent the ‘organic’ Serbian nation, have publicly blamed the parade for flooding in the country in 2014. 112 Similarly, in Northern Ireland, negative attitudes towards sexual and gender differences stem from the dominant conservative interpretation of Christianity. In the 1970s, for example, a campaign against homosexuality led by the Democratic Unionist Party leader Ian Paisley, a staunch anti-Republican, used conservative Christian rhetoric to argue that same-sex relations would destroy the moral fabric of the nation, eventually achieving 70,000 signatures (or 5% of Northern Ireland’s population) on a petition of support. 113 Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, which brought an end to the protracted ethno-nationalist conflict, the gains made by Northern Ireland’s gay community have only prolonged the “sense of ontological insecurity among a section of the Protestant/Unionist community that has seen its traditional value system as under attack in recent years”. 114 Prominent politicians have drawn on their conservative Protestant faith to call homosexuality “vile”, “repulsive” and “nauseating”. 115 Latent social unease with regards to SOGI rights has been stoked and mobilised as a political issue and cast as a struggle against the imposition of neo-imperialism and alleged ‘Western decadence’ in many parts of Eastern Europe (where anti-Western parlance often refers to the EU as ‘Gayropa’ and those espousing liberal views are called ‘tolerasti’, a portmanteau of ‘tolerance’ and ‘pederast’), Sub-Saharan Africa, and South and Southeast Asia – often both deliberately silencing and invisibilising local non-heteronormative SOGI and the role played, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, by Western private donors in supporting these agendas. 116 4.3 Social exclusion and isolation The most immediate expression of social exclusion for SGM people is often from their own family members, which leaves them isolated and without the social safety nets of family and community. Those whose SGM status is revealed as children experience particular isolation, as they are often thrown out of family homes and unable to finish school, experiencing higher rates of unemployment, homelessness and instability as a result, and often resorting to petty crime, violence and sex work to survive. The UNHCR has stated that “families and communities may threaten serious harm on LGBTI individuals, and this can constitute persecution where (as is often the case) there is no meaningful State protection.” 117 Thisis not limited to directly conflict-affected societies. In the US state of Louisiana, a survey of youth who identified as gay or transgender found that 25% had left home due to conflict with families. In the state’s family courts, SOGI has also been used as a justification for parents to declare their children “ungovernable”, relinquishing them to the state’s juvenile detention and mental health facilities – systems already overloaded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. 118 In Northern Ireland, research has shown that the threat of rejection by their families leads 112 D. Igrutinović, S. Sremac and M. van den Berg, Pride parades and/or prayer processions: Contested public space in Serbian Belgrade Pride 2014, Journal of Empirical Theology, 29(2), 2015, pp.8, 11–12; S. Sremac, Z. Popov Momčinović, M. Topić and M. Jovanović, For the sake of the nations: Media, homosexuality and religio-sexual nationalisms in the post-Yugoslav space, in S. Sremac and R.R. Ganzevoort, 2015, Op. cit., p.55 113 M. Duggan, 2012, Op. cit., p.53 114 G. Ellison, 2015, Op. cit., p.2 115 Ibid., pp.15–16; M. Duggan, 2012, Op. cit., p.1 116 S. Dai, Examining the legislative difference on homosexuality among African countries: Domestic and international factors, Paper presented at the ISA Annual Convention, Atlanta, 16–19 March 2016 117 UNHCR, Women on the run: First-hand accounts of refugees fleeing El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico, Geneva: UNHCR, 2015b, p.37 118 See a discussion on this family law phenomenon in W. Ware, 2011, Op. cit., pp.14–16; Lambda Legal Defense & Education Fund, Youth in the margins: A report on the unmet needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender adolescents in foster care, New York: Lambda Legal, 2001; D. López Castañeda and H. Myrttinen, 2014, Op. cit.